I’m almost there. I just need this precollege to whip me into shape, and my absurdly long mission will finally be complete.
Which brings me to the next part of said mission: getting Heather on my side.
“Mint chip or cake batter?” Heather asks, holding up an ice-cream scoop.
“Both.”
She raises an eyebrow at me. “Bold combo, but I respect it.”
Usually Heather isn’t the one scooping the ice cream and shoving it into one of the endless blenders at the Milkshake Club, since she’s the owner of the all-ages music venue, conveniently located at the bottom of our apartment building. But tonight is an exception, since it’s doubling as a goodbye to my dad before he leaves for his annual two-week-long business trip out to his company’s main headquarters in Chicago. It’s always a bummer when he goes, but they also let him work from home the other fifty weeks out of the year, so I guess we’re not in any real position to complain. Especially since he’ll get back the day before my birthday, so we’ll still have plenty of time to celebrate (read: subject him and Heather to the movie musical of my choosing).
Heather gets to fixing up my cake batter mint chip monstrosity and a strawberry chocolate shake for herself. She doesn’t start the vanilla with toffee bits one for my dad quite yet, so I know I have a little time to get to her.
“So you already knew about the precollege?” I ask.
The smirk is already squarely on her lips before her eyes meet mine, so I know I’ve been about as subtle as the sound check of the metal band that’s supposed to play later tonight.
“I am aware of its existence, yes,” she says. “Why ever do you ask?”
I should have waited until I had ice cream in my mouth to try to navigate this. “It’s just … don’t you think it’d be a good opportunity?”
She shrugs. “I mean, yeah. But so is, y’know. Finishing regular-kid high school.”
“Heather,” I whine.
She tops off our milkshakes with the customary absurd amount of whipped cream, sprinkling hers with Snickers bits and mine with Andes mints. Then she pushes my milkshake over to me and comes around from her side of the bar to sit next to me on one of the bright pink sparkly stools that match the rest of the club, which essentially looks like it was jointly interior decorated by Barbie and the Powerpuff Girls after they got fast and loose with a confetti cannon.
“I mean, what’s the pull here?” says Heather. “Are you telling me you’d really rather live on the West Coast?”
I wrinkle my nose. “It’s nothing to do with where it is, and everything to do with what it is.”
“Well, if you really want to get your dad on your side, let’s think about it from his perspective. Why he might say no.”
I narrow my eyes at her. She has half a psychology degree from before she sharply pivoted to business, but she sure does try to milk it for all it’s worth.
“Because he wants to ruin my entire adult life?”
Heather makes a noise that is a frankly terrifying impression of a game show buzzer. “Try again.”
I sigh into my milkshake. “This program is so selective. I worked really, really hard to get in,” I tell her. “And they didn’t just choose me. They gave me money. They want me.”
The words rub me in a way I didn’t mean for them to, flashing back to what I said to Teddy about my mom earlier. But this has nothing to do with that and everything to do with my future. With the very thing I’ve had my heart set on since the first time I opened my mouth to sing.
“But you’re kind of obligated to stay there for four more years if you go for precollege, right?” says Heather in that measured, rational way of hers that I love as much as I hate. “And you had all these other places you wanted to audition for. NYU. BoCo. Carnegie Mellon—”
“And those are all great options, but this—this would get me up to speed even faster. I’d be able to start auditioning again, and college probably wouldn’t even be an issue anymore. I’d be eighteen and able to work without legal ramifications and raring to go.”
“Like, talent-wise, maybe. But human-wise?”
“Human-wise?”
“And besides, who’s to say a few dance classes wouldn’t get you where you needed to be just as fast?”
I scowl at her. “No, no, no. I’m trying to get you on my side,” I tell her. “You’re not supposed to try and get me on Dad’s.”
“I’m just being objective!” She takes a thoughtfully large sip of milkshake. “But I know what you mean. If you’re looking for me to dissect his reasoning on this, I haven’t talked to him yet, so I really don’t know.”
This is a rare event. I’ve essentially been co-parented by my dad and my aunt from the start. When my grandparents peaced out and neither of their kids opted to go with them, they left Heather in charge of my dad, which by the transitive property of accidental parenting left Heather semi in charge of me.
“What I do know is that maybe we should all take a breather on this. They don’t need a yes right away, right?” says Heather. “Maybe we just … simmer a bit. Come up with a list of logical reasons to let you go. Crank out a PowerPoint or something.”
What she’s hedging around with this advice is that she wants to avoid one of everyone’s least favorite Millie Moods: the kind where I come slightly unglued. And I include myself in that “everyone.” I don’t like it either. But trying to control it is like yelling at the ocean to stop making waves in shapes you don’t like. Sometimes I feel every bit as powerless to stop myself as everyone around me.
I mope into my milkshake, taking another sip. I don’t want to concede to this idea, because I’m not exactly a logic-based individual. I’ve always been one to follow my heart and let my brain catch up. It’s messy, sure, but it’s me. It’s why I’m good at what I do, and why when I make friends, I make them for life.
Oof. And there comes a pang I can’t ignore. I have a lot of friends at school, barring Oliver. Kids I’ve known for years. It’ll be hard to leave them. I’ll have to put in an extreme amount of effort to make sure we all stay in touch. But it still isn’t enough to stop me, even if there’s a part of me that wishes it were.
I’m so preoccupied in both my milkshake and my thoughts that I don’t even notice my dad arrive until Heather kicks up the blender to start making his vanilla one. He settles in the stool next to mine, looking as absurdly out of place in this Hello Kitty wonderland as he always does, and bops me on the shoulder.
“I’ve been thinking—”
“About the program?” I ask.
“About summer dance classes,” my dad says patiently. “I know you had a few in mind. Maybe tonight we take a look at them all before I leave?”
I purse my lips. “Orrr maybe we could take a look at the precollege program?”
Heather passes him his milkshake. My dad isn’t really a “sweets person,” so he claims, but he humors us with our never-ending reasons for ice-cream rituals regardless.
My dad does that close-lipped, Clark Kent-y smile of his. “I’ve taken a look.”
This is probably where I should take a beat to strategize my next move, but instead of doing that, I blurt out, “And?”